Mozilla Firefox over SSH tunneling X11 connections

DJayC · 2005-02-01 21:52:51

Is there anyone having luck run firefox remotely displaying on a local X server?

I am ssh'ed to a machine with X11 forwarding. Various apps like xeyes, xcalc, etc will run on the remote machine, and display on the local machine. For some reason when I run firefox, it doesn't display on the local X server.

Any ideas?

phrakture · 2005-02-01 21:56:56

I had it working fine a while back... I think the only thing was that the buttons didn't render correctly...

cactus · 2005-02-01 22:07:25

Firefox, and mozilla for that matter, take ages to render via ssh remote X over anything but a fast connection. You can start firefox, and wait for 1 to 5 minutes for it to actually start rendering sometimes..yikes.

i3839 · 2005-02-01 22:23:51

I just tried it with ssh -C -X, and it works. A short mozilla session took 0.7 Mb down- and 0.3 Mb upload, and was awfully slow (though it took just 10 seconds before a window popped up).

cactus · 2005-02-01 22:33:42

if you have a good connection, ditch the -C compression seems to slow ssh down. It is just for crappy bandwidth connections (dial up).
Also, you might try blowfish. it is a faster cipher. Of maybe aurFour, an RC4 deriviate. Stream ciphers are great for such uses. I cannot really make any statements about the security of the openssh implementation of RC4, though. I don't know if they are throwing away the first 1500bits or so like they should be..

i3839 · 2005-02-01 23:47:48

No matter how pathetic the compression or encryption method used is, they all can do 1Mb/s easily with a 200Mhz cpu. So it's just a bandwidth/latency problem. With 10 Mbit or so you may want to ditch the -C option, but otherwise it should speed things up. If not, then there's a big bug somewhere.

khazdar · 2005-02-02 13:59:28

The performance I get using firefox over ssh is very nice. My cable max upload speed is about 2 Mbps.

My client machine is running winXP, and I use the putty ssh client. I connect to the X session via VNC.

-Khaz

DJayC · 2005-02-02 16:26:03

To answer my own question...

firefox will not start a new instance if there is already one running on the remote machine. When you run firefox, it will just open a new window, or new tab in the existing instance. This is why it wasn't doing anything when I tried to start firefox to have it run on my local display.

In summary, make sure all firefox instances are killed on the remote box before attempting to forward the display to your local machine.

colnago · 2005-02-02 19:20:28

I think the newer builds of firefox allow multiple instances.

If you have bandwidth problems, use a light browser like dillo and you willl not even notice the connection speed.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-02-01 21:52:51

Mozilla Firefox over SSH tunneling X11 connections

#2 2005-02-01 21:56:56

Re: Mozilla Firefox over SSH tunneling X11 connections

#3 2005-02-01 22:07:25

Re: Mozilla Firefox over SSH tunneling X11 connections

#4 2005-02-01 22:23:51

Re: Mozilla Firefox over SSH tunneling X11 connections

#5 2005-02-01 22:33:42

Re: Mozilla Firefox over SSH tunneling X11 connections

#6 2005-02-01 23:47:48

Re: Mozilla Firefox over SSH tunneling X11 connections

#7 2005-02-02 13:59:28

Re: Mozilla Firefox over SSH tunneling X11 connections

#8 2005-02-02 16:26:03

Re: Mozilla Firefox over SSH tunneling X11 connections

#9 2005-02-02 19:20:28

Re: Mozilla Firefox over SSH tunneling X11 connections

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